Posted on 11 September 2012

Dealing with click fraud is nothing new. In fact, it has been around in some form ever since pay per click advertising had appeared online in the 1990s. While it is something that is commonly associated with PCs, the fact is that even mobile campaigns are increasingly being targeted in click fraud schemes. But there are things that you, as an advertiser, can do in order to keep from wasting your advertising dollars on fraudulent traffic. Here are some of them:

Start paying attention to your statistics

Check where your traffic is coming from, when it is coming to your site and how many of these clicks result in conversions. You should also explore the activity of the users on your site, such as the amount of pages that they visit, or the length of time they spend on your website. One of the reasons why click fraud flourishes is the fact that advertisers often don’t pay too much attention to their campaigns.

Recognize the signs of click fraud

Fraudulent clicks can be generated in two ways. First, there is the simple server side fraud, where a publisher, or advertising network, is manipulating server data to bill you for clicks that simply never went to your website. To protect yourself from this, you will need to compare the amount of clicks that you’ve received on your website, as well as the number of clicks reported on the advertising network’s statistics. It is normal that there might be a bit of a difference in the sets of numbers, but if you start seeing a noticeable discrepancy between the number of clicks you see on your server stats and the number reported by publishers, there is a chance that something is going wrong. Either their tracking system is having problems or they are doing something sketchy. This type of fraud is rare on larger publishers and advertising networks, as it is unlikely that they would want to ruin their reputation by engaging in fraudulent behavior. But on the other hand, the smaller players, especially those based in foreign countries where enforcement of internet crime is either very lax or nonexistent, may not really give too much attention to their reputation.

There is also fraud that is more complex than just manipulating the numbers on server data. It often comes as the result of fraudsters using bots and other unauthorized means to generate ad clicks that didn’t come from a real user. While it may seem to be quite a challenge to detect, it actually isn’t that complex. Tomorrow we will present you with some more ideas on how you can spot this kind of fraud and what actions you can take to prevent it from causing potentially serious losses for your business. Remember, when it comes to online marketing, the more knowledge you have, the better prepared you will be to face many of the challenges and potential problems involved with this industry.

Posted on 09 August 2012

Anyone involved in online marketing will know that Facebook’s main source of revenue would be ads that are placed in different areas of the site. In the majority of cases, advertisers pay on a “pay per click” basis, meaning that they would pay a certain amount every time someone clicks on their ads. Obviously, this is nothing new and has been around since online advertising came into existence, and is used by most other advertising networks and websites as well.

But with a pay per click type of setup, there is one potential problem for any advertiser: paying for invalid clicks. This means clicks on the ad coming from users that weren’t really interested in it in the first place. Now there is no way to eliminate all invalid clicks, simply because of the way they are generated. There is always the possibility of someone accidentally clicking on your ad instead of another area of the site that they wanted to click on. They would then quickly hit the back button or close the new browser tab that was created.

Then, there are clicks coming from competitors who want to gain some insight on the products that you sell, how your landing pages look like and what type of advertising techniques you practice. While many would decry this as a waste of their advertising budget, as the click is coming from someone who will obviously not buy anything from you, it is actually not really a serious issue. You are likely to get just a few clicks from competitors and chances are, you’ve also clicked on the ads of competitors in your niche just to check out what they were up to.

But a more serious problem with pay per click advertising is click fraud, which is also referred to as “invalid clicks” in the industry. These clicks could make a big hole in your advertising budget, as you’re spending money getting visitors to your website which have absolutely zero chance of converting. If it happens once or twice a day, it’s not a big deal and is just part of the cost of doing business online. But if it starts to happen a few dozen times a day or more, depending on the size of your advertising campaigns, then this could become a much bigger problem for you.

While there are many who would talk about the virtues of advertising on Facebook, there are a few problems with its advertising platform that came to light recently and have sparked some debate in the industry. One of these main problems was invalid clicks reported by advertisers. So what really are these invalid clicks, what can you do about them and what has Facebook done to address the issue? We will examine this important problem more in details tomorrow so that you can become more aware of how it affects today’s businesses.

Posted on 12 July 2012

When you use email marketing, remember that what you’re doing is talking to your reader. Sure, it may not be a live conversation like on the phone or by instant messenger. And depending on how many people you got on your list, your message could end up being read by anywhere from a few dozen to several thousand subscribers. Even if email marketing is essentially a mass mailing, you still need to keep the reader engaged and make them feel like you’re writing to them one on one. Think about how sales copies are written. They make the reader feel like the author is talking directly to them and forget the fact that there are thousands of other people who are reading the same message.

It is a well known fact that email messages convert well. Once the reader clicks that link and goes to your website, you get a better chance of them making a purchase, or taking any other action that you would want them to take, such as filling out a form to get a quote, or booking an appointment. Studies have shown that email marketing has better conversion rates than other forms of online advertising, such as pay per click ads on search engines or display ads on websites.

But this doesn’t mean that email just causes products to “sell themselves” no matter what some of the gurus will try to tell you. Yes, there is a higher chance that someone who ends up clicking on your link will buy from you. But in the first place, you need to get them to open your message, read it and then take the desired action.

Now this is the tricky part and this is also where many online marketers have the most difficulty. They may have a subscriber list of a respectable size. Sometimes, it can have thousands of subscribers who are interested in the niche. They send email after email, but the results simply aren’t there. Is it that their product is just not good enough, or the landing page wasn’t optimized properly to deliver maximum conversions? Perhaps. But one of the main reasons why email campaigns fail is simply because of the email messages themselves.

You need to convince people to open your message, pay attention to it and then take action. This, of course, is easier said then done. Your users may have subscribed to plenty of other email lists, so they will not take several minutes to attentively read each message and then decide whether they want to continue on to your site or not.

There are lots of resources out there on how to write good messages when you market your business by email. They provide a lot of detailed information on the topic and many of these guides are available for free. But there are some basics that you need to understand before you do anything else. Tomorrow we will take a look at some of the most basic tricks in getting your email campaigns to work.

Posted on 12 June 2012

Let’s face it: the world of online marketing is mainly centered around one thing: advertising a business or product. There are numerous ways to get the message across, such as paying for ads to be inserted into pages or search results. There are also actions that can be taken to make the promotion seem more natural, such as using SEO techniques. And then we have, of course, social media, which offers a variety of ways for marketers to get their message to the user.

Regarding advertising on Facebook, there has been a lot of talk about what changes are going to be brought to their current advertising model. One thing that is reported is that few people are interested in clicking on obvious ads. For many marketers, the pay per click ad model on Facebook, which functions in a similar way to Google Adwords content ads, has been a bit of a disappointment. Some report low interest in their ads and out of all people who click on the ad, few actually stay on the page and engage with it. Users already have a mental image of what the ads look like and where they’re going to appear on a page, so they’re a lot more likely to just tune out and ignore them, much like people who flip past the advertising pages in a magazine.

As a response to this, Facebook is undergoing some changes to its advertising business model, in order to change it to make advertising seem more organic and better integrate it with people’s news feeds on the site.

The new advertising options make use of features that have already existed on Facebook. When a business posts something to their Facebook page, their fans may get a notification about it on their news feed. However, this causes an issue of visibility. Many users are currently subscribed to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of pages through their Facebook account, as it’s very common for users to like their favorite bands, TV shows, celebrities and some less “famous” entities like the page of a local store they’ve visited or a website they found entertaining or useful and that had a Facebook “Like” button on this. This obviously creates a certain problem for marketers. It would be impossible for Facebook to display all of the updates to each fan, as this would result in blowing up the users news feed. Also let’s not forget that Facebook is primarily a site for person to person and not person to business interaction. While users may enjoy getting updates about their favorite businesses, they are more concerned about what their friends are doing and not what their local restaurant has on the menu today or he fact that the local auto shop they went to last month has a special on tires.

Facebook has put forward some innovative solutions to this, which we will look at tomorrow.

Posted on 20 April 2012

Now that you know some ways that you can use to better manage your online advertising budget and keep from wasting money, here are some more methods that you can use to increase your savings even more.

Take advantage of coupons and vouchers

Many online ad platforms, such as Google Adwords, Facebook Ads and many other smaller ad networks offer discount codes and vouchers which give you a certain amount of advertising credit for free. In most cases, all that you would need to do is to register for the service and put in your payment information. Sometimes, you will need to deposit a small amount, such as $10 or $20 in your account and the value of the voucher will be then added to it. By taking advantage of these offers you are essentially getting free advertising that you would normally have to pay for. The offers and their value often change, so the best way for you to find available coupon codes would be to simply search for them on Google. Very often you will find the current ones posted on many sites, or instructions on how you can get them.

Use some of the smaller ad networks

While there are some popular ad networks such as Google Adwords, Bing and Facebook Ads, those who are interested in running pay per click or cost per impression ads will find that there are plenty of other networks out there that can provide you with good quality traffic at lower costs. Some of these could be specific to certain geographical areas or niches. To find them, you can simply do a search on Google, or visit some discussion forums related to online marketing. This will give you some additional insight from members about which companies they are using and whether they would recommend them based on the results that they got. However, be careful before spending too much money with a previously unknown company. It is better to try them out with smaller campaigns to see if the traffic is giving you the results that you were expecting and if you didn’t have any problems with their service.

Work out deals with other webmasters

Rather than going through an ad network, you can try working out deals with other webmasters that have sites which are related to your niche, but aren’t direct competitors. This may allow you to get some good advertising opportunities at a lower cost. It may not be so easy to achieve when you’re just starting out, but it’s definitely possible. To find these opportunities, all that you have to do is to network. Participate in online marketing discussions, as well as forums that are related to your niche. This will allow you to meet some other webmasters and you may be able to get some advertising opportunities, as well as any other services that your business might need in the future.

Posted on 04 April 2012

If you own a local business and use the internet to promote it, then you’re probably concerned as to whether you’re getting the results that you’ve wanted from your marketing efforts. After all, nobody wants to spend time and money on online advertising only to make little progress with it. This is why it is very important for you to monitor your progress with internet marketing and see which of your strategies work and which ones don’t work as well. This will give you an idea as to whether you should keep doing what you’re already doing, or whether there are certain changes or improvements that would be in order for you.

While this sounds easy to say, keeping up with the performance of your online marketing efforts will require a bit of work, especially if you haven’t really been paying attention to the results that it’s been bringing you. This happens to many small business owners that get caught up with their main line of work, especially if their business has been doing quite well as of late.

The first thing that you would want to do is to make a list of all of your marketing and advertising channels that you’re using. Then, divide these into sub groups. So for example if you use social media and classified ads sites, you would have these 2 as main advertising types. Then you would list the specific social networking sites that you use for your business, as well as the classified ads websites that you post your ads to on a regular basis. The same can be applied to other methods of online marketing that your business uses, such as pay per click ads, where you can further drill down the traffic and results that you’re getting by each network, each specific ad campaign & ad copies, as well as individual text or banner ads that you’re running on the network. Remember to be as detailed as possible as this will help you optimize your efforts.

Now that you have this list done, you would need to track where you website traffic is coming from. If you haven’t already set up a tracking script (there are many free ones out there that you can use), look at your server logs to see where the traffic on your business website is coming from.

As for tracking conversions (visitors who became paying client or took other action that is profitable for you), there are many free scripts that you can use in order to see which clicks are converting, if your site is directly selling items to customers. Otherwise, if customers contact you by phone or walk into your place of business, then tracking conversions won’t be that easy since you will be limited to asking customers how they found out about your business.

If you’re satisfied with the results, then keep doing what you’re doing… but keep paying attention to where your traffic is coming from. If on the other hand, you want to improve some things, then we have some more tips for you tomorrow.

Posted on 10 December 2011

If you take a look at recent online marketing news, you will see that using pay per click advertising is growing online. In that past few years, this use has grown steadily. One of the reasons behind this growth is the fact that many small businesses are now using PPC advertising to get more visitors to their websites and customers to buy their products. If you want to get started as a small business user, then here are some tips that you can use to launch your first successful campaigns:

Take Advantage of Free Offers

Many PPC advertising service providers give free ad credit to members who join. You can find these free offers simply by looking online. Some web hosts also offer free advertising credit to clients that use their services. For example, you can get a $100 Google Adwords credit from many web hosting providers. Making use of these credits will allow you to start advertising at no cost on various platforms and see which ones will be the most suitable for your business and bring you the best quality traffic.

Don’t Forget to Target Your Ads

This is one of the most important aspects of PPC advertising: geo targeting, which means only serving your ads to web users that are in a certain defined geographic region. There are several uses of this: obviously, if you have a local business that only serves a certain area, you will want to limit your clicks to come from that area. Anything else will simply be a waste of money. Even if you do business globally, you may want to limit the countries that you target for your advertising, mainly due to the fact that there’s a much higher amount of fraud and poor quality traffic coming from certain countries.

Some PPC services also allow you to choose specific sites or groups of sites that your ad will appear on. They also have demographic targeting, meaning you can make your ads appear on sites that will be mostly visited by the demographics that are the most likely to purchase something from your business, thus making your traffic more useful for you.

Use Keywords Wisely

If you advertise on search services, like Google or Bing, then keywords for PPC are as important as for SEO. Even more so, as you will be paying for each click. Be sure to do your keyword research in thoroughly before and carefully select the keywords you will want to target. Avoid keywords that will be too broad, as they will result in getting traffic from people who may not necessarily be looking for what you’re offering. If your business sells clothes and accessories, instead of targeting general keywords like “fashion”, you may want to target more specific ones like “Diesel jeans” or “discount handbags”, etc. Basically, you need to think as one of your customers and target keywords that they would be most likely to search for.

Posted on 29 November 2011

You’ve probably heard about how effective it can be to build a blog to help you with your online marketing efforts. It is true that if you have a website, adding a blog can be very useful, as it will deliver interesting content that will be both useful for your readers and also will be well loved by search engines like Google. This will help you rank higher for your targeted keywords and ultimately lead to more money for you in the end. Building a blog is straightforward enough, but there are some things you would need to be aware of first. You will see some of the things you can do to make your blog a more effective tool.

Choosing a Good Blog Hosting Provider

If you already have a website, then your web host will probably allow you to add another website either on its own domain, or as part of a subdomain of your existing one. If you don’t then you should sign up for a basic shared hosting account to begin. Avoid using the free services like Blogger, as they’re not really a good choice if you want to make money from your blog. A paid hosting account gives you more flexibility and reliability over the content of your blog.

Figure out How You Will Make Your Blog Profitable

If you already have a website where you’re selling your own products, one of the ways to make your blog some money for you would be to link to the relevant pages of your main website from articles posted within your blog.

But there are also other ways that you can monetize a blog even if you’re not selling anything directly online. For example, you can include affiliate links to products that you provide information on in your blog, or that are related to its content. So if your blog deals with mobile phones, you can include mobile related affiliate offers on your blog. It is also possible to add some pay per click ads from a service such as Adwords or Bidvertiser, where you will get paid for every click that someone makes on one of the ads served on your blog.

Decide What Kind of Content You Will Have On Your Blog

Of course, you need to decide on a niche for your blog. But also, you will need to determine what you will be talking about more specifically in that niche on your blog. Your blog could, for example deal with new happenings in your niche/industry. Or you could provide product reviews of products that you sell on your own site or are an affiliate of. And then there is the possibility of putting up informational and educational content that’s related to your main niche. Of course, you can also combine all of these possibilities in your blog, but it is a good idea to know what kind of posts you will be making once the blog is up.

Posted on 09 November 2011

If your goal is to profit from the busy holiday shopping season as an online entrepreneur, then there are a few things that you would need to do. Of course, there are certain things that you must do on your site to get it ready. But what about the overall marketing strategy that you will be employing to get visitors to your website and turn them into profitable buyers for you? Again, there are ways to make this happen. Let’s take a look at some of the methods that you could use to do this.

Make a marketing plan for the season

In order to succeed and get the most benefits, you will need to create a well thought of marketing strategy. This means planning it right ahead of time. Yesterday, we have seen that you should start preparing your website in the beginning of November and the same holds true for your marketing strategies. So get ready to develop your marketing strategy early as well. It will require some thought, but with the resources available online, it is not as difficult as you think it is. Start writing down ideas on which marketing channels you will be using, as well as how you plan to attract your customers to your site.

Get your tools and marketing materials ready

Do you plan on using Adwords but didn’t yet create an account? Do you plan on getting on Twitter for the first time? Now would be the time to start creating accounts at these places. This will be one less thing that you will need to take care of before you kick off your holiday sales season. Then, there is preparing the ads themselves. Previously, we have seen that it is important to have good landing pages, especially when using pay per click advertisements.

But there are many methods of online and offline advertising and you need to get your materials ready for these as well. If you have a Facebook page, then it will be a very good idea for you to create some Christmas graphics to advertise your promotions. Same thing if you buy banner space, you will need to redesign your ads to reflect the holiday season as well as your current promotions.

Decide what kind of specials and promotions you will give for the season

This can be obviously a certain percentage off selected merchandise, but could be anything else that gives more value to your shoppers. For example, it could be free shipping for orders, a two for one special on certain of your items, free gift wrapping services, etc. Basically, think of a way of still being profitable, while attracting more customers to buy from YOU. Also it is never a bad idea to see what your competitors are offering, so that you can try to beat their offers or give something better to your own customers. You want them to buy from YOUR site, so you will need to make it worth it for them.

Posted on 17 September 2011

When it comes to SEO, there are plenty of misconceptions, especially among new webmasters and those who have just started out in online business. Some people seem to believe that just by doing the most basic SEO work or by hiring some SEO “expert” for $5 at Digital Point, they would be able to propel their site to 1st place on Google within a few days. For anyone that thinks that way, well sorry but this is just not how SEO works.

If you want to improve your websites ranking on the search engines, then your goals will need to be realistic. One of the ways of doing so would be to take a look at the websites that are already ranked for the keywords that you are targeting. Do a keyword analysis of your site to see which keywords you would be better off targeting. In many cases, you will be able to find some long tail keywords that are more specific to your offerings and that have less competition. If you do business at a local level, then targeting some local keywords can also be very helpful. Once again, the reason behind this is that the competition for local keywords is a lot lower than for the more general ones, thus it would be much easier for you to rank for them.

One thing that you will need to understand about SEO is that it is more of a long term process, rather than an instant solution to get traffic to your website right away. If you have just created your website, then it can take several weeks or even months before you are able to get any decent amount of traffic from natural search engine results in certain high competition, popular niches.

For this reason, you need to consider using some other advertising methods in the meantime to bring some traffic to your website. Pay per click search advertising obviously comes to mind here. Many would say that it brings you the same results than SEO, but is able to do so a lot faster. The major drawback, however is that you will need to spend some money on it, sometimes considerable amounts if the keywords that you are targeting are quite competitive and thus very valuable.

If you truly want your website to bring you the money that you want, then you would need to understand that online advertising is a very diverse environment, where you have dozens of different ways to generate traffic to your website besides using SEO. Using media buying, article marketing, social media marketing or video marketing are all things that you can do alongside SEO to make your site more popular. Remember what the main focus behind creating a website is: to make money for you. By employing the proper strategies to get the visitors that you need, you will be able to improve your ROI by getting more visitors and turning these website visitors into profitable clients for your business.

Posted on 05 August 2011

Over the years, Google Adwords has become known as the dominant platform when it comes to pay per click advertising. There are plenty of business owners, as well as various internet marketers and affiliates who have made use of it. However, just because a service is popular, it doesn’t mean that it is good. There have been numerous complaints in webmaster and online marketing forums of people getting banned from Adwords for reasons that are not that clear. Often, when the client contacted Google, they would simply get a generic response stating that they violated the terms of service.

However, when it comes to pay per click advertising, Adwords is not the only game in town. Now that Bing has combined their pay per click platform with Yahoo Search Marketing, many people have jumped to create an account and start advertising there. According to a recent survey done by an internet marketing company, over half of small business owners who are using pay per click marketing are already using or are considering using Bing for their online marketing campaigns.

One of the complaints that many advertisers on Bing (formerly Microsoft AdCenter) had is that they weren’t receiving enough traffic. Well, it is a known fact that the Bing search engine receives far less traffic than Google. However, now that they are working together with Yahoo, this should resolve the complaint that many advertisers have. For those who are already used to Google Adwords, using Bing should not be much of a challenge, as the basic way that both advertising platforms work is very similar.

But when it comes to pay per click ads, there is another site that some marketers and business owners sometimes overlook: Facebook. Let’s not forget that this social networking site is the second most popular website on the internet, right after Google. So the traffic is obviously already there, you just need to put your ad in front of people who will be interested in your products. Facebook has a pay per click advertising platform that works in similar ways to Bing and Google Adwords.

The main difference, however is the way the traffic is targeted. Obviously, Facebook is not a search engine, so you can’t really target people that are looking for specific keywords. However, there are some other demographic options that you can use instead to target you ad. All that you have to do to get optimal results would be to target your ad so that it will only be shown to the demographic that would more closely match your customers. You can select things such as age, gender, relationship status, location, etc.

So as you can see, there are other pay per click advertising solutions besides Google Adwords out there. If you are considering using one, all you simply need to do is a bit of research on how it works and whether it is a good platform to use for promoting your specific products online.

Posted on 02 July 2011

If you are creating a blog, there are various ways that you can monetize it, which simply means to make money from it. Yesterday, we have seen the two easiest and most common ways of making some profit from your blog, which are inserting pay per click ads on it, as well as putting up a donation button. But there are two other options worth mentioning. While they may be a bit more complex, they are still being used by plenty of bloggers out there and can be extremely profitable.

Putting up affiliate ads

The basic concept behind affiliate marketing is that you get paid a certain commission when someone clicks on an ad on your blog and either buys something, or performs a specific action such as signing up for a website. Unlike pay per click ads, you do not get paid for every click that the ad receives from a visitor.

When it comes to affiliate offers, in order to get the most success, you should use offers that are closely related to the theme of your blog. So if your blog talks about cars, for example, you could put ads for car insurance companies, which typically pay you whenever someone requests a quote from the insurance company. You can also participate in the Amazon Affiliate Program. Amazon.com is one of the world’s most popular online retailers and they sell hundreds of thousands of items in different categories. So if your blog talks about photography, you can put up some ads for photo cameras from Amazon. If someone clicks on the ad and makes a purchase, you will receive a commission based on the amount of the total sale. Remember that in order to make the highest amount of money possible, the affiliate offers that you promote on your blog should be related to its content.

The more “generic” ads such as the “shoot 3 ducks and get a free iPhone!!” banners are best avoided, since many of your readers have probably already seen them and will simply ignore them. While you can put some affiliate offers that aren’t really related to the niche of your blog, doing so is not recommended since your readers are far less likely to even click on these ads in the first place.

Selling your own products

This can be a good monetization option if you produce your own products, or you simply own an e-commerce site that sells certain items that could be of interest to your readers. For example, if you have a blog about technology and at the same time, you sell video game consoles and computers on eBay, you can put an ad for your eBay page inviting users to visit your online shop. To make it even more attractive for them, you could even offer a special discount code for readers of your blog. This can be a very profitable monetization choice, but of course you would need to be already involved in some form of e-commerce for you to make use of it.

Posted on 01 July 2011

If you are thinking of putting up a blog on the internet, one of the main things that you would be thinking of would be how to make some money from it. Perhaps you may have heard about some bloggers earning good money from their blog and were wondering whether it would be possible for you to do the same. Well, the answer is yes, but just like with anything else related to earning money online, you will need to put a lot of effort into it to make it work. Here let’s explore some of the easiest methods of monetizing your blog first:

AdSense and other pay per click ads

This is considered by many bloggers to be one of the easiest ways to monetize a blog. It is also the most simple and straightforward. Essentially, you would be putting pay per click ads on your blog and will be receiving a certain sum of money whenever someone will click on one of the ads. These could be text ads, or banner ads. These days, advertisement distribution networks will automatically cause ads that are related to the topic of your blog to be displayed, so they will be more relevant and thus more likely to be click on by viewers. For example, if you have a blog that talks about politics, the ads that are displayed are likely to be more or less related to this topic, such as political polls, websites for candidates or political parties, etc.

While Google AdSense is the most popular of pay per click advertisement networks among bloggers, there are several other smaller ad networks out there such as AdBrite and Bidvertiser. The amount of money that you will make from having these ads on your blog will ultimately depend on how many visitors click on them. So the more traffic your blog gets, the higher the amount of revenue that you can generate from pay per click advertisements on it will be. This creates a good incentive for you to promote your blog well and to have regular interesting updates on it.

Putting up a “donate” button on your blog

This is quite straightforward. You can put a PayPal (or Moneybookers, or AlertPay, or any other payment system) button on your blog that will be there to let users donate a bit of money to support your blogging efforts. If the content of your blog is very interesting and it is read by a lot of people, you can make some money just by donations from readers. However, don’t expect to make thousands a month, unless you have a REALLY high traffic blog. Sure, it’s possible that a billionaire will stop by your blog, really like it and then decide to make a six figure donation. This has happened. But the odds of that happening to you are roughly equivalent to the odds of winning the lottery. Still you will probably make a few bucks, enough to cover your hosting fees and maybe pay for your internet connection.

Posted on 13 March 2011

If you’ve been reading certain guides on online business, you may have been told that in order to succeed you need to have “multiple streams of income”. Now what does this mean? And most importantly, is it actually true or is it simply a gimmick that is used by product creators to try and have you buy their guides?

Simply put, having multiple streams of income means that you are making money online through various different sources. It’s actually as simple as that. And it is also a concept that can be applied to any online money making activity, whether you are running affiliate offers, selling your own products, providing services or publishing pay per click advertisements on your site.

Now is it something that is really necessary to have? If you are running a business that is bringing you a full time income, then the answer is yes. Now why is that? So that your business can keep operating even if one of your income sources declines or dries up completely. Sure, you may think that it won’t happen to you, but if you’ve read any internet marketing forum, you will find plenty of stories about it happening to other marketers.

There are certain products or offers which are only popular during a certain time and then their popularity decreases. Think of the Acai Berry CPA offers that were all the rage about a year ago. Sure, a lot of marketers made money from them. Some made very serious amounts of cash. But a few months after it peaked, the offer started going down due to the fact that the product received some negative press due to questionable claims made by manufacturers, plus many people complaining that they were having a hard time canceling their subscription to this rebill offer.

There has also been cases where some smaller CPA or affiliate networks were having trouble paying those who run their offers. Some people were getting paid late, others ended up not getting their money at all in some cases. Obviously, if you only work with one network and they have trouble paying their affiliates, this will spell trouble for your business as well.

Organizing multiple streams of income is not difficult at all. Say if you are a CPA marketer, you simply have to work with a few different networks and run some different campaigns on each. You don’t even have to do it all at once if it would be too hard for you to manage. For example, you could run offers from network A for the first half of the month and network B for the other half.

If you are a freelancer such as a content writer or web designer, advertise your services on a few different sites and not only one. Also, work with a few different clients if possible. That way, if one of your regular clients who you’ve worked for during many months suddenly doesn’t need any work done during this month, you won’t be left scrambling to find other ones.